A really well written story where nothing happens!

A nice hefty hardback, completely new with shiny, embossed lettering on the front. Pristine. (I hate it when people break the spine of a book – it’s sacrilege!) As to the actual story, I couldn’t comment yet – it’s only just arrived, and sadly I’m not first in the queue to read it.

However I can tell you a bit about the first book in the series – The Black Prism. It was…different. For those of you that don’t know Weeks’ writing it’s good solid fantasy, though he has rather too graphic a taste in gruesome torture, violence and monsters, for me really. For example the Ferali from his first series – The Night Angel trilogy.

The Black Prism introduced a new concept for magic, chromaturgy, which focusses on how people see and use colour (put simply, people can use the different colours they can see to make a magical substance that can be shaped/molded into different uses – so the more colours you can see/use, the more wide-ranging your magical abilities). I like the use of the fact women can see more shades of colour than men. (For more, semi serious ramblings on colour perception and naming see the XKCD study).

There are a good few twists and turns through the first book and some quite engaging characters. But it was unusual in that almost nothing happened for most of the 700 odd pages. Now that happens in some books, but generally they’re badly written ones. But it didn’t matter, because “nothing” happened in a really addictive way. There was a lot of detail and a lot of background to the characters and what had happened in the world before the time the story is set. This was cleverly woven in throughout the book.

I’m looking forward to reading this shiny new book and finding out what (if anything) happens next.